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Friday, March 24, 2017

`Culture Is Continuity with the Past'

“Does
all this talk of high culture have a ring of snobbery? If so, I have badly misrepresented
it. There is nothing snobbish about seeking out the best that has been thought
and said. What it is, as noted earlier, is elitist, a word in our egalitarian
age in even worse odor, perhaps, than snobbery.”

With
predictable regularity I receive comments and emails in which readers deploy
one or both of the damning adjectives cited by Epstein – snobbish and elitist. As
Epstein makes clear, the words are not synonyms. All of us are snobs, pro or
con, about something, whether spaghetti carbonara or Ellington’s Sacred
Concerts. Pure democrats of taste are unicorns. Elitist cultural values today are
rare and best kept prudently unexpressed. Culture makes demands of time and
cognitive effort, and fewer than ever are up to the task. But it never occurs
to some of us to bemoan the odious labor of reading, gazing and listening. The
works of high culture call us to attention, and their strictures can be difficult,
flattering and sweet. Recently, an anonymous reader wanted to know how I could “endure”
the prose and verse of Yvor Winters. With great pleasure, I said. What others
choose to read is none of my business. A big part of my job is sharing my
pleasures.

Those
who haven’t read Tennyson or Proust but are intimidated by the prospect of
doing so (public schools get most of the credit for this dereliction) are
another story. I empathize with some of them. In my job as science writer for
the engineering school of a university, I speak daily with engineers, scientists
and mathematicians. I’m always out of my league. I have a B.A. in English (earned when I was fifty), a
degree that has become the ready-made punchline of a joke, but I don’t accuse
the STEM-types of snobbery or elitism. I read what I can about their research
and ask a lot of humbling questions. It’s called continuing education. Epstein
continues:

“Cultural
elitists, as do connoisseurs generally, like only the best and seek it out. But
how do they determine what is best? From tradition, from the tastes of their
culturally elitist forebears, from their own refined aesthetic and intellectual
sensibilities. Along with Longinus, they identify as high culture those works
of art and intellect that elevate the soul, stay in the memory, and appeal
across different cultures. Elitist the cultural ideal certainly is, but with
the difference, as noted by Matthew Arnold, that it is open to anyone who
wishes to make the effort to attain that ideal.”

No
one willing to do the mandatory work is excluded. In this sense, nothing is so democratic
as high culture. (I watch a lot of crap movies but never fool myself about
their worth. Innocent escape is perfectly acceptable but not as an exclusive
diet.) As usual, Epstein makes numerous, seemingly self-evident observations
that would never have occurred to me. Please read all of “The Cultured Life,” but
here is an Epstein Sampler:

“Culture
is continuity with the past: A cultureless person knows only about, and lives
exclusively in, the present. Few things are as pleasing—thrilling, really—as
reading a classical author and discovering that he has had thoughts and emotions
akin to your own. So I have felt, at times, reading Horace, Montaigne, William
Hazlitt, and others who departed the planet centuries before my entrance upon
it.”

“My
candidate for the most cultured American novelist of the past century is Willa
Cather.”

“Poetry,
once central to high culture, has become degraded to an intramural sport.
Although the audience for poetry in America was never large, today even that
audience has diminished, and the only people who seem to read contemporary poetry
are those who write it or write about it.”

“High
culture, even though it often traveled under the banner of the avant-garde, was
always about tradition. A cultured person has a standard, a recollection,
through literature andhistory
and philosophy—if not necessarily through personal experience—of greatness.
Without such a recollection, rising above mediocrity is difficult, if not
impossible.”

1 comment:

I'm about to turn sixty-five, so maybe my perspective is that of an old man, but I've become so used to my own contempt for the self-appointed cultural elite, that the word "elite" has come to mean little more than a designation for a caste of poseurs.

For welders, doctors, carpenters, and lawyers, their work is what makes them elite. For writers, that sense of the word has been lost. In fact, the wholesale corruption of words has been the most extraordinary achievement of the contemporary cultural elite. Oddly enough, if I had to guess, these are the very people who've complained to you about your elitism.